by Colin Meloy
“This is my son, Charlie, Your Highness,” said Charles. He put his arm around Charlie’s shoulder and pulled him forward. “Charlie Fisher Jr. I may have mentioned him when last we spoke.”
“Oh yes,” said the queen, peering down from her throne. “How do you do, Mr. Fisher?”
“Very well, thanks,” said Charlie, before adding, “Your Highness.”
The old woman must have been hard of hearing, as she was forced to crane her head forward to hear Charlie’s words. Her jewelry jangled noisily as she did so. “Please,” she said, gesturing to Charlie. “Our ears are not what they once were. All of you, please come closer.”
Charlie gulped, remembering his friends. “Oh, we really shouldn’t,” he began to say, but stopped when he felt his father—and the pickpockets included—carry him closer to the dais.
“That’s better,” said the queen once they were within a few feet of her. “We have been cooped up in this room all day long, receiving visitors and well-wishers. It is a tiring business, being royalty.” She allowed a sly smile.
“Not to mention that weight you’re carrying,” said Pluto suddenly. “I mean, the crown and the jewels and all.” Charlie shot a look at him.
Every soul awaited the queen’s response to this sudden, unbidden interjection; when it came, they each breathed a sigh of relief. The queen seemed amused. “Indeed,” she said. “And who might you be?”
Pluto began to say his name, but Charlie interrupted. “This is Clark, Clark Kent.”
“Have we met before, Mr. Kent?” asked the queen.
“I don’t believe so, Your Highness,” was Pluto’s reply.
“Funny. The name sounds familiar.”
“Well,” said Charlie quickly, “it was really a tremendous honor to meet you. We shouldn’t keep you any longer, Your Highness.”
“But we have not yet met all the children,” said the queen, ignoring Charlie’s impatience. “Please, come forward and state your names.”
This, Charlie could not bring himself to watch. One by one, the members of the Whiz Mob were ushered forward to stand on the dais, to bow and kiss the rings of the queen of Lumiravia. Like a man in a firing line, awaiting the countdown and the muzzle flash, Charlie stood transfixed, unable to move. He could only hope that the pickpockets’ skill was honed enough for them to do their work without detection, that they might be miles from the Palais du Pharo before the alarms were rung and every policeman in Marseille had been dispatched to recover the crown jewels of the Lumiravian kingdom.
Charles Sr. stood off to one side and watched the formal introductions and the shows of deference, clearly proud to be providing these kids with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When they’d finally finished, the elder Fisher was then waved forward to the dais and a short conversation transpired between him and the queen. Pluto, Jackie, and Michiko had returned to Charlie’s side and were trying to hide smiles; Charlie could only imagine what they’d done.
The man in the three-piece suit, at the command of the queen, approached Charlie’s father and presented him with an envelope, which Charles received with a deep bow. He opened it, surveyed its contents, and placed it in his jacket pocket with a nod. A wave of the queen’s hand signaled that the visitation was over, but not before she called Charlie back over to the makeshift throne.
“Your father,” said the queen, “is a very good man. He has done our country a tremendous service. You would do well to follow in his footsteps.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” said Charlie. Glancing up at the old woman, he made a quick inventory of the queen’s adornments and was amazed to see that every jeweled ring was still there, attached to her fingers. Her baroque sash was unaltered and her crown, still perched on her head, seemed to have all of its twinkling gems accounted for. He breathed a sigh of relief; perhaps the pickpockets had read the circumstances correctly and had decided to play it safe.
With that, the queen stood. The honor guards on either side of the chair brought their bugles back to their lips and performed another loud fanfare; the queen flinched as it came to a finish. “We do so grow tired of that,” Charlie heard her mutter before she shuffled off the dais and back through the door, out of the room.
Charlie could not have felt more relieved to have the whole episode over and done with, an episode that had transpired in his mind like a slow, agonizing death. His feet felt like they were floating as the visiting party exited the room and began walking down the corridor back toward the ballroom. He fell back while Pluto and Jackie talked animatedly with his father; Michiko walked in the lead of the group. Charlie was shaken to the core and decided that he would speak to his fellow Mobbies as soon as they had a private moment. He would insist that they establish some boundaries, where any kind of party or gathering that would happen to coincide with his father’s line of work—or Charlie’s personal life at all, for that matter—should be assiduously avoided. He felt as if he knew them well enough that they would accommodate the change.
When they arrived back at the ballroom, Charles Sr. turned around to face his son, beaming with pride.
“Well?” he asked.
“That was really neat,” replied Charlie. “Thanks for inviting me. Us.” Pluto, Jackie, and Michiko had gravitated away, back to the party crowds, allowing Charlie and his father to have a moment together.
“Neat doesn’t half describe it,” said his father. “You were just witness to one of the more seismic shifts in global politics in the last decade—scratch that, century!”
“I was?” asked Charlie. “I mean, she seemed very nice. And very, you know, royal.”
Charles Sr. laughed. “What, her? She’s a relic, Charlie. A figurehead. A throwback to a bygone era.”
Charlie felt confused. “So,” he said, “what was so”—what had his father said?—“seismic about all that?”
“Because, Charlie,” began his father, now adopting a low, conspiratorial tone, “she gave me the Rosenberg Cipher.”
“The what?”
Charles Sr. gestured to Charlie, indicating that he should keep his voice down. His eyes flitted about the room before returning to his son. “I should really get this off to my security detachment as soon as possible, but I did want a moment to celebrate.”
“What is the Rosenberg Cipher?” pressed Charlie.
“Only the most important document to have been won in negotiation between countries, perhaps in our lifetime, itself the most powerful weapon one can have in the current global climate. Its value, immeasurable. Charlie, suffice it to say that I am speaking without hyperbole when I say that the fate of the world’s superpowers currently rests in this document that is now in my possession.” He took a deep breath and spoke again, quietly but firmly: “I have a feeling that once this is delivered into the hands of my betters, your father’s career is all but made. French ambassador. Secretary of state. Really, I think the sky is the limit.”
Something was dawning on Charlie. Something very grave. Little pieces of a puzzle tumbling together. He saw in his mind’s eye the envelope being transferred from the man in the three-piece suit to his father. Charles Sr. continued speaking, rambling joyously.
“A palatial residence off the Champs-Élysées sound nice to you, Charlie? No, you’re right. Perhaps we split time. Half the year in Paris, half the year in Provence. But now that you mention it, with a prominent state job, I may be back in DC, at the president’s beck and call. I imagine he’ll be demanding quite a bit more of my time, once it comes to light that I’ve managed the retrieval of the Cipher. Oh, Charlie, you don’t know how long and involved these negotiations, these discussions have been. She’s a funny old bird, the queen. Would only work through me. But I was the one who managed it, where so many others had failed. I was the one who got the Cipher. And now I have it, Charlie. I have it right here in my pocket.”
“No, you don’t,” said Charlie.
Charlie spoke these words quietly, flatly. In a monotone. Words spoken in a voice completel
y drained of all emotion. It might’ve been a robot speaking them.
“What?” asked his father, suddenly shaken from his happy monologue.
“You don’t have it. In your pocket.”
Charlie didn’t even need to stick around to see if his assumption was correct. By the time his father had reached into his inside pocket—his coat pit—and discovered that it was, in fact, completely empty, Charlie had already run to the center of the ballroom and had begun searching for the Whiz Mob. “No, no, no, no, no,” dribbled from his mouth as he pushed his way through the partygoers, the princes, and the politicians. Pluto, Michiko, and Jackie, who had just been there, just beside him, were nowhere to be seen.
Vanished.
Sembene and Fatour, who, all evening long, had been shuttling between the ballroom floor and the back kitchen, were no longer visible in the phalanx of servers who plied the waters of tuxedoed and gowned aristocracy, doling champagne and oysters to willing takers.
Disappeared.
Down in the coat check, a window let onto a room full of furs and overcoats and a pair of bored, middle-aged Frenchmen sat on stools, arguing football, and did not have any idea where a large Russian boy who had been working with them might’ve gone, nor any clear recollection of who might’ve hired him or what he might’ve been doing there and did Charlie want to pick up his coat now or later?
Dematerialized.
He sprinted into the center of the gardens, where the music was still listing from the bandstand and couples were still squared off, shuffling blithely in the grass beneath the pavilion. Every flicker of yellow made Charlie’s head whip around as he searched for that diminutive Brit euphemistically known as Mouse, called that because of her stature but also, Charlie had learned, because of her ability to slip away into the smallest cracks and evade any pursuer who should be so unfortunate as to need to pursue her.
Disparu.
The Whiz Mob had pulled a nasher. The Whiz Mob was gone.
Surrounded by cooing lovers and networking socialites on the lawn of the Palais du Pharo, Charlie stood frozen. The sun had long gone down and the stars wheeled above him, cold and indifferent. Tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. He felt as if every brick and granite block of the Palais was unmooring itself from its mortar and collapsing onto his shoulders as he replayed every incident, every moment he’d enjoyed for the last six weeks in the company of the Whiz Mob of Marseille.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said, and he realized he’d been repeating that one, sorry syllable for the last ten minutes. As if by repeating it he could undo everything, he could spool back time and start again, spool it back to that moment in the Place Jean Jaurès when his pen had turned into a stick and he’d chased that white-shirted boy down the alleyway.
An alarm had been raised back at the ballroom; a man stopped the orchestra in the pavilion to give an urgent announcement to the crowd. Charlie did not stay to listen. He knew where he needed to go. By the time the gala function at the Palais du Pharo had been reduced to little more than a crime scene, Charlie Fisher was on his way to the Panier.
The winding streets of the ancient neighborhood were unnervingly quiet as Charlie sprinted along them. He was certainly the only individual wandering the byways of the Panier in a tuxedo, and the few fellow pedestrians he passed eyed him with suspicious glares. He hadn’t bothered with the unreliable city bus, but had instead run down the hill from the Palais du Pharo. He was completely out of breath when he caught the cross-quay ferry, along with a quartet of barhopping sailors and a tipsy fisherman. His tuxedo was slicked with sweat and clung to his body like a diving suit. The bent buildings of the Panier felt particularly misshapen and looming; he felt them watching him, laughing at him for his folly.
Was this the Whiz Mob’s idea of a joke? Was this some sort of hazing ritual? Would they all be waiting for him, back at the scatter, ready to laugh off the whole episode and welcome him, officially, into the gang? As much as he wanted to believe this scenario, the stakes seemed too high. Whatever it was they’d stolen—this “cipher” his father had been given—was too important. What’s more, they’d stolen it from Charlie’s father himself. Was there not some directive in the Whiz Mob code that forbade targeting the relatives of fellow members? He searched his memory as he walked, trying to remember what exactly the Whiz Mob code was. Certainly it was not something written down; it was not some legally binding contract. It occurred to Charlie that the Whiz Mob code was about as real and tangible as a puff of smoke. It was whatever the Whiz Mob wanted it to be. And that idea, frankly, terrified him.
His heart was racing; he could feel it beating in his skull. He ran as much as his body allowed and then was forced to walk, quickly, along the cobblestoned streets until he arrived at Rue Sainte-Françoise. He disallowed his mind to consider the implications of what had just transpired; he only wanted to find the Whiz Mob.
When he scrambled into the plaza of the Bar des 7 Coins, the address he’d searched out those many weeks ago on his search to find Amir and his comrades, he came up short.
The café was not there.
The facade of the building had been meticulously erased. Where before the sign above the doors had advertised the Bar des 7 Coins, there was now an empty space. The windows were dark; the doors were locked. Peering inside, Charlie saw only emptiness. The tables and chairs were gone. His heart sank.
One of the panes of glass in the door had been broken, and he managed to fish his hand inside it and throw the lock. The door wheezed open and Charlie wandered inside.
“Bertuccio?” he hollered. “Pluto? Jackie?”
There was no answer.
He crossed to the other side of the bar, but found that the shelves behind it had been emptied. There was no Pernod bottle to hide a mechanism to open a secret door; what’s more, there was no mechanism at all. He ran his fingers along the side of mirrored wall, trying to find the edge of the door, but there did not appear to be any doorway whatsoever. It was as if the doorway, and the pathway beyond, had been somehow erased.
He stumbled backward, away from the bar, and tripped on an overturned chair. He went spilling to the ground comically, scraping his elbow as he did so. A fine tear appeared in the sleeve of his jacket. He quickly clambered upright, embarrassed by his fall even though there was no one there to witness it. A feeling of dread and self-loathing was growing inside him like some diseased flower. He ran back out the door into the small square in time to see an old woman dragging a cart down the road.
“Excusez-moi!” he shouted. The woman stopped abruptly and turned to look at him. He struggled for the French, saying, “Le café—le Bar des Sept Coins—vous le connaissez?”
The woman only looked at him blankly.
Charlie pointed frantically at the empty facade of the building behind him. “Le Bar des Sept Coins. Le café, ici!” He found that he was now shouting. “Où est le café?”
The woman, seemingly unthreatened by Charlie’s tone of voice, simply shook her head and continued walking down the street. Her steps echoed against the ravine of tightly knit buildings, long after she’d disappeared around a corner.
Charlie was left alone, standing in front of the empty café, with the world pressing down on him like a vise.
Chapter
EIGHTEEN
Charlie stood where he was for a long time. He stood motionless, but his interior world was churning. He had become the projectionist of his memory’s penny cinema; he was watching the film of the last six weeks flicker against the screen of his mind’s eye.
The first reel showed him in the Place Jean Jaurès, on the fateful Tuesday in April, writing stories in his notepad. He watched it all transpire, though now he recognized Pluto and Jackie in the crowd; he saw Molly steering the man in the fedora. He saw Michiko off to the side, and, of course, the boy Amir, sitting down next to him. He watched himself running after Amir, providing his alibi to the police officers. But now he saw Amir bow perhaps too quickly to his demand to teach him
the ways of the pickpocket. Amir hadn’t been threatened by Charlie’s ultimatum, not in the slightest. What was stopping Amir from simply ditching this curious American boy?
No time for answers; the next reel had clicked into place. There he was, wandering the Quai des Belges with Amir, learning prats. And then Jackie appeared—it had all been orchestrated, hadn’t it? The business card with the address of the Bar des 7 Coins—had it been Amir who had given it to him? Or Jackie? With each memory coming to life on the screen, the tone of the film changed from comedy to tragedy. It then occurred to Charlie that this picture he’d been living for the last several weeks had never been a lighthearted caper, but a dark and sinister documentary, totally devoid of any charm.
And he had been its biggest fool.
He’d been the perfect stall. The ultimate steer to guide the Whiz Mob to its real goal: his father. And he’d done it without even knowing it.
The reality of the situation was almost too painful to bear.
Finally, Charlie began walking. He soon found himself down by the water, hidden amid the roaring crowds of tourists and sailors, the Saturday night crowd down by the Old Port. It was getting late, but the café crowds were alive and spilling into the streets. Charlie was a funny addition to the cheery scene along the port, with his drawn face and disheveled tuxedo, torn now at the elbow. Several people made catty comments to him as he passed; he did not care, but continued walking. He didn’t know where he was going; it was like he was following a dérive, but one that allowed his sorrow and shame to lead the way as he grappled with the barrage of emotions and questions that were assaulting his mind.
He couldn’t go home to his father. Not now. Not after what had happened. He could only imagine the scene: once the Palais du Pharo had been emptied and the grounds scoured for the culprits who’d stolen this invaluable document, he imagined his father being chauffeured home. Charlie wondered if the calls from the embassy and the State Department were already flooding in, and the silence of the car ride home would be his father’s last refuge for a long, long while. He imagined his father, now home, sitting in his study with his head in his hands as the three phones on his desk, each color coded by the line, were ringing unceasingly.
